Helen Lundeberg

Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999) was an American painter.

Along with her husband Lorser Feitelson, she is credited with establishing the Post-Surrealist movement.

Her artistic style changed over the course of her career, and has been described variously as Post-Surrealism, Hard-edge painting and Subjective Classicism.

Lundeberg was born in Chicago in on June 24, 1908, the eldest child of second-generation Swedish parents.

In 1912 her family moved to Pasadena, California.

As a child, she was an exceptional student and an avid reader.

Her intellectual aptitude earned her inclusion in a Stanford University "Study of Gifted Children", which looked at the characteristics and development of children who ranked in the top 1% in California schools.

During her early adulthood, Lundeberg's inclination was to become a writer.

In her early life as a painter she would paint portraits of herself, mother, and sister.

In 1930, Lundeberg graduated from Pasadena Junior College.

She enrolled in art classes at the Stickney Memorial Art School in Pasadena, where she met professor and fellow painter Lorser Feitelson.

Feitelson's dynamic approach to composition and broad ranging interests in the international art scene inspired Lundeberg.

In the 1930s, Lundeberg was working in both the social realist and post-surrealist styles.

She first exhibited at the Fine Arts Gallery in San Diego in 1931, when she showed her painting Apple Harvesters.

In 1933 had her first solo show at the Stanley Rose Gallery in Los Angeles.

She and Feitelson married that same year.

Together in 1934, Feitelson and Lundeberg founded Subjective Classicism (or New Classicism), which later became known as Post Surrealism.

Using her painting Plant and Animal Analogies as a case study and an ideal, Lundeberg wrote the New Classicism manifesto.

Post Surrealism represented the first concentrated response in the US to European Surrealism.

Unlike their European counterparts, American Post-Surrealist artists did not rely on random dream imagery.

Instead, carefully planned subjects were used to guide the viewer through the painting, gradually revealing a deeper meaning.

This method of working appealed to Lundeberg's highly intellectual sensibilities and her engagement with surrealism is present, to varying degrees, in her work throughout the rest of her career.

From 1936 to 1942, Lundeberg was employed by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, for which she produced lithographs, easel paintings, and murals in the Los Angeles area.

Working in oil paint and with a team of four assistants, Lundeberg completed a series of three murals, Preamble to the Constitution, Free Assembly, and Free Ballot for the Bob Hope Patriotic Hall.

In 1941, the WPA commissioned Lundeberg to paint a mural at the Fullerton City Hall (now the Fullerton Police Department).

Lundeberg's mural, History of California, covered three walls of the city council chambers with scenes ranging from the arrival of Spanish explorers to the rise of Hollywood.

During the 1950s, Lundeberg moved towards geometric abstraction and Hard Edge painting and away from the representational sensibility that had informed her early work.

Though always based in reality, Lundeberg created mysterious images that exist somewhere between abstraction and figuration.

Repeatedly described as formal and lyrical, Lundeberg's paintings rely on precise compositions that utilize various restricted palettes.

Paintings from this period employ the idea of "mood entity", a concept in Post Surrealism that was concerned with evoking states of mind, moods and emotional content unique to each work.

These murals were removed from the building in the 1970s and are now considered lost.

Los Angeles mural painter Kent Twitchell created a new series of murals after the lost Lundeberg murals for the Bob Hope Patriotic Hall during the restoration of the building.

In conversation with Fidel Danieli, as part of the UCLA Oral History Project in 1974, Lundeberg explained, "When Lorser came and began to explain things, to make diagrams and to give us principles of different kinds of construction – light dawned! It was really very exciting."

When the building was converted into police headquarters, the mural was painted over and remained covered until it was restored in 1993.

Also under the auspices of the WPA, Lundeberg completed the mural History of Transportation near the southern border of Edward Vincent, Jr. Park in Inglewood, California.

This 8 ft-high, 241 ft-long, mural is made of petrachrome and depicts the history of the Centinela Valley.

It includes images of people from all walks of life employing various means of transportation from carriages and steam trains to automobiles and airplanes.

After decades of damage, the mural was restored in 2007 and relocated to its present location across from Inglewood High School.

The preliminary drawings for this mural are part of the permanent collection of the Nevada Museum of Art.

Lundeberg's work with the WPA in Southern California is noteworthy both because her works were well-received and because she was one of only three women artists in Southern California making public artwork for the WPA.